Core Principles

Our advocacy efforts are guided by the following principles:

We believe that the purpose of student financial aid is to ensure everyone has equal access to postsecondary education. NASFAA adheres to the following core principles, originally created by the NASFAA Reauthorization Taskforce and updated during the National Conversation Initiative to reflect our current goals for college access and success. NASFAA affirms that student financial aid should:

Promote fairness and equity for students across all sectors of postsecondary education, with a particular emphasis on low-income, underrepresented and underserved students;

Stress the primacy of need-based aid;

Support policies that address the needs of disadvantaged students;

Advocate accountability;

Encourage simplicity and predictability;

Empower student financial aid professionals and their schools with the flexibility to respond to the specific needs of their students;

Recommend policies that accommodate the diversity of academic delivery models;

Encourage the use of technology wherever possible;

Eliminate statutory requirements that use financial aid to enforce unrelated social policies; and

Validate proposed recommendations with research and data analysis wherever possible.